WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
1d ago
Although it is a very healthy sign from Europe in general, i am reminded of how when the US announces something it'll say "100 billion spent on EV charging stations" and China will say something like "10 million EV charging stations have been made"
German spending in particular seems prone to this. So much money spent, so little actual product made.
WestphalianPeace
4d ago
Blessed is he who can avoid lifestyle inflation
WestphalianPeace
4d ago
do you see 75k as "you now have enough money to avoid living wildly inefficiently, you can now start putting the extra into the market" or as "if you've already saved up to this point, 75k compounding with everything in VTI will keep you safe for the rest of your life. even if you're incapable of picking stocks"
WestphalianPeace
5d ago
whenever I see these "I got so rich now i'm retired" posts all can I wonder is not "how do I emulate you" but rather "what is your advise for the mass of peasants with some money to their name who are not you, and cannot become you"
WestphalianPeace
12d ago
it's worth reiterating that the heritability of political views is extremely high. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4038932/
More than half a century of research in genetics, neuroscience and psychology has demonstrated that human behaviors, including social and political attitudes, are influenced by genetic and neurobiological factors.........[Authors] pioneered this radical departure, finding that genetic variance accounted for a substantial portion of individual differences in conservatism, sub-dimensions of social, economic and defense ideologies, as well as individual social and political attitudes. Additional twin and extended kinship studies which included parents, non-twin siblings, spouses, and twins reared apart confirmed these earlier results and found that most individual political attitudes were influenced by a combination of genetic effects (which explain between 30 and 60% of variance) and environmental influence. In this way, children resemble their parents because of their genetic relatedness as much as parental upbringing and social environments.
block quote edited for readability
not disagreeing with you. just adding for emphasis because it's easy to forget just how large a factor it is on people's outlooks.
WestphalianPeace
15d ago
What a time to be alive
WestphalianPeace
15d ago
Imagine a world where Marxists ardently claim that Index investing is the next "Stage of Investment" that "Rearranges the Mode of Investment", and which "Structures Capital in its latest stage, making new Social Relations possible" (investing in the first place)
Meanwhile the culture war continues and anti-marxists claim index funds prevent entrepreneurial spirit in individuals and therefor must be avoided at all costs.
WestphalianPeace
16d ago
The very simple answer is to claim that all Lenin-Stalin thought is actually deviation from authentic Marxist Stage Theory. To develop a Plain Reading of Marx that advocates for capitalism as a matter of development and productive capacity as a further step towards actual Marxism.
You take credit for every advance in GDP. Whenever a country implements market reforms and grows that's Actual Communism. When a country flounders that's Deviationism. Cheap electricity? A sign of future Marxism. Rising house prices? State deviationism away from Marxist overabundance. Ozempic is Marxist. High Speed Rail is Marxist. Forests are Marxist. Breathable air is Marxist. You take credit for all the gains of capitalism but disavow any ownership local tensions. You conflate development with historical destiny, you disavow all failures as tragedies of our age will will, eventually, at an unspecified time, be overcome once The Next Stage of History comes into being.
You buy the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index to keep your 250 million alive. There is no contradiction. You use some of your proceeds to pay people to write books, science fiction, and fan fiction. You live a quite life. Your goal isn't to build a gym and show how change is possible now. Your goal is to entice people with a possibility of the future. Your friends call you Fabius. No one gets the reference. Nothing should ever be available now. Communism will arrive "Like a thief in the Night" and "No one knows the time or hour". The uneducated will find these phrases self-evident, although they can't quite place why they find them intuitive.
Yours is not a Vanguard Party of action, but a vanguard party of thought. Whose goal isn't to instantiate communism, that of course is a historical necessity driven by new Modes of Production whose being isn't conceivable yet but which the capitalist mode must eventually create, but rather your goal is to keep alive the communist dream among some educated few because it is beautiful. You turn theory away from the drab of Actually Having to Do Something. Instead your society becomes a society of dreamers, a society of romantics who feel self assured in their inevitable destiny and who want to spread the word not out of revolution against capitalism, but out of love of the vision. You avoid all communist iconography. You avoid the Red, the hammer and sickle, the Socialist Realism. Those are deviations and you won't be tarnished by them. You indulge in a little identification by calling yourself "historically Parisian in outlook". No one gets the reference.
You spend half of the returns from your Index position on your project. the other half remains with you personally. You die 30 years later a Billionare.
WestphalianPeace
24d ago
KulakRevolt has a long history of outlandish failed geopolitical predictions and should be read more as entertainment than as prophecy.
My personal favorite being a strong prediction that Egypt would invade Israel after Oct 6th in support of Hamas
that is a very good distinction
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